It is certainly far easier, for the most part, to give than to
refrain from giving. We are at last shaking off the form, of
self-indulgence called charity; we realize that if mankind is to profit,
sterner conceptions must prevail. The apotheosis of the god-favoured
loafer is drawing to a close.
For the rest, there was the inevitable admixture of quackery about our
reforming sage; his warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours
somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those
dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all
religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge
with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the
pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the
bean-humbug . . .
He had the true maraboutic note.
And for me, this regenerator crowned with a saintly aureole remains a
glorified marabout - an intellectual dissolvent; the importer of that
oriental introspectiveness which culminated in the idly-splendid
yearnings of Plato, paved the way for the quaint Alexandrian
tutti-frutti known as Christianity, and tainted the well-springs of
honest research for two thousand years. By their works ye shall known
them. It was the Pythagoreans who, not content with a just victory over
the Sybarites, annihilated their city amid anathemas worthy of those old
Chaldeans (past masters in the art of pious cursings); a crime against
their common traditions and common interests; a piece of savagery which
wrecked Hellenic civilization in Italy.
